With dinner over and the village settling in for the night, the seven of us have some time to ourselves. I’m exhausted, but everyone has their curtains pulled back. After everything we learned and saw today, no one seems quite ready for sleep yet.
“I sat next to Doc at dinner. He said these meals are pretty standard. Not even the best they have.” Eric sits at the edge of his bed wearing the biggest smile I’ve seen from him in ages. “And he said I can be his apprentice. I get to start learning everything tomorrow and eventually I can be a doctor, just like I always wanted.”
“That’s great!” Constance snuggles tighter into Thomas’s side. “I want to work with the kids. I mean how adorable is Nellie, right? What is everyone else going to do?”
“Greg said I could help with getting the houses ready for us.” Thomas smiles with the healthy side of his face. “When they don’t need more housing, there are always repairs and updates. They have a shop with tons of tools, some of them I’ve never even seen.”
“We’ll probably get to work together quite a bit.” Daniel stands and stretches his arms above his head. “Frank and I have about a million ideas between us, but we’ll probably need someone a bit more handy to put them into reality.”
“You got it. As soon as the houses are done, consider me your right hand man.” Thomas turns his attention to me. “What about you, Rebecca? Anything catch your interest today?”
I set down the stack of clothes from Ana I’ve been folding. “I haven’t decided yet.”
Thomas and the others stare at me, expecting more, but that’s all I can say. I haven’t picked a job because I’m not planning to be here long enough to need one. With the conversation cut short, everyone calls it a night and moves the curtains back into place.
The second I have our sheets set, Daniel pulls me to the bed. “Want to tell me why you’re so quiet tonight? What’s going on in that unpredictable head of yours?”
“We can’t stay here.”
“Wanna run that one by me again? Because it sounded an awful lot like you want us to leave the place that has offered us the only safety we could possibly hope for.”
I turn to him and grab his hands. “This place is amazing, and I can’t wait to spend the rest of forever here with you.”
“So we are staying?”
“As soon as we get all those people who helped us out of the PIT. You promised.”
Daniel tightens his grip on my hands and lines pop up between his eyebrows. “I would have told you anything to save your life. No way are we going back there.”
I throw his hands back at him. “I’m not asking your permission, Daniel. If you won’t come, then I’ll go alone. They could all be dead by now, but I have to go back in case they’re still alive.”
“That sounds like just about the dumbest idea you’ve ever had, and if you think I’m going to watch you march out of here on a suicide mission, you’ve completely lost your mind.”
I twist the leather bracelet around my wrist and take a deep breath to calm the anger festering in my core. I don’t want to fight with him. “Then don’t watch me.”
“Oh, I’ll be watching you every second of every day.” Daniel stands and wipes his hands over his face. “And if by some chance you happen to sneak by me, I’ll lead the charge to go get you. I’ll carry you back slung over my shoulder if I have to.”
“You’re an ass.”
“And you’re stuck with me.”
Desperation and fury boil up in my gut and spread out to the tips of my fingers. I stand up and stomp as far from him as I can in our little curtained off corner of the room. “Maybe there’s nothing I can do for them, but I can’t stay here and carry around the guilt of leaving them behind. We just left them, minutes after promising to get them out. They don’t even know about the poison capsules. Now we do and we can go back and get them out, just like Eric did for us.”
“Some of us are trying to sleep.” Patrice’s haughty tone is unmistakable.
I push past our privacy sheet without waiting to see if Daniel is following. Taking the same stairs as last night, I march out onto the roof. Daniel is right on my heels and slams the door behind us.
“What do you want, Rebecca?”
“What do I want?” I throw my hands in the air. Shouldn’t it be obvious? “I want the life I was supposed to have. I want to go home and check on my father. I want to sit with Cheryl and not worry about anything more important than finishing school. I want to go back to a few weeks ago and never make that video so Patrice wouldn’t be here and all those innocent people in the PIT would be safe. Or at least as safe as they were before I messed everything up.”
Daniel pulls me into his arms, but I resist the urge to snuggle into him. I don’t deserve his comfort. “I’m sorry, love. I can’t give any of those things to you.”
“I’m not asking you to.” I push away, and the night air instantly cools my heated face. “I can’t undo my past, but I’m in complete control of the future. That’s why I’m going back to the PIT. My father and Cheryl are outside my reach, but there is something I can do about those people back in the PIT.”
“Like what?” Daniel takes my hand and squeezes a little too hard. “What is your master plan for helping those people? Are you going to start a riot and break them out, too?”
I snatch my hand out of his. “I don’t know, alright. I can figure it out on the way there. But I can’t stay here and do nothing.”
“Rebecca,” Daniel rubs his hands over his face. “Think about this. You can’t possibly want to go back there.”
“You think I want to go back!” I spin away from him and let out a scream into the night air. “Of course I don’t want to go back. I’d have to be insane to want to leave this place. But this isn’t about what I want. Those people trusted us. We told them we were all getting out, and you promised me we could go back for them. Those people deserve Allmore, too.”
The PIT always felt like such a dark place, but I was wrong. Sure there were bad people there. But there was also good. People like us who were thrown away, but trying to make the best of a rotten situation. I assumed we were a minority in a cesspool of criminals, but what if it was the other way around? What if only a tiny portion made the PIT miserable for the rest of us?
That old man I met my first week in the PIT. He tried to help me, tell me that not everyone in the PIT was a lost soul. But he was old and scary, so I discounted his words. The truth was there right from the start and I ignored it because I still believed the Cardinal’s lies.
The door to the roof opens, and Elizabeth saunters out like the cat who caught the canary.
“Go away, Elizabeth.” I practically spit the words at her.
“Whoa, don’t shoot the messenger.” She holds her hands out at her side. “I just came up here to let you know that your private conversation is so loud, half the village has probably heard. Including Liam and Ana who live right next door. You might want to keep it down.”
“This conversation is none of your business.”
“Look, princess. I couldn’t care less if you want to pack it up and run a solo death march back to the PIT. But then you might mess up. Maybe give away the location of this cushy new paradise, and I can’t have that.”
“Not everything is about you, Elizabeth.”
“And the rest of the people who live here?” Daniel takes a hesitant step toward me. “Are you willing to put all of them in danger? What about sweet, little Nellie?”
“I…” I hadn’t even thought about it. I spin away from him and let out my frustration in a deep growl that comes all the way from my toes. How can I possibly measure one life against another?
“Let’s make a deal.” Daniel waits until I give him my full attention. “Thirty days. Thirty days to live here. To get healthy, rest our bodies, learn what we can about life outside of the Territories. Thirty days to think about this and plan it out. After that, we can talk about this again.” He stops my protest with a raised hand
. “I’m not making any other promises, Rebecca.”
I turn away from him and kick a loose piece of gravel across the roof.
“You know I’m right about this. Going off without a plan will only be a fast death.”
Of course he’s right. Daniel always has a logical answer to everything. But I don’t want to be rational or be soothed. I want to tighten my fist around the anger boiling over in my belly and charge into it full speed.
“Fine.” I shove past him to the door without looking him in the eye. “Thirty days.”
“Perfect,” Elizabeth claps her hands together. “Now let’s get some sleep.”
I march down the stairs, through the curtains, and climb into bed, pulling the covers up over my head. Daniel joins me a minute later, but I pretend to already be asleep.
Part of me is burning with anger at being stopped. But mostly I’m relieved. Grateful that I have another thirty days to live here with all of them. Thirty days with Daniel, even if I am furious with him right now. And that fuels my anger at myself. If I were as strong as Daniel seems to think I am, I would have fought harder. But the truth is I don’t have the courage to leave.
Seventeen
Breakfast is a silent affair, and everyone but Daniel and I eat quickly before moving out into the village to start their new jobs. Patrice sticks around a bit longer before heading out, I guess going back to our room above Doc’s office. Daniel taps his foot in a spastic pattern on the floor. He has to be itching to get over to Frank’s office, but no way is he going to leave me alone.
Liam and Ana glide into the dining hall like fairytale royalty, sharing warm smiles and greetings with the people still finishing their meals. It takes a few minutes, but eventually they make their way over to us.
“Daniel.” Liam holds his hand out to shake Daniel’s. “After yesterday I figured you’d already be half-deep into some crazy scheme with Frank.”
“I…,” he meets my gaze so I know his words are mostly for me. “I wanted to make sure Rebecca found the right job first.”
“I think I have the solution to that.” Ana holds a hand out to me. “We’ll make sure she finds the right place here.”
The three of them all stare at me expectantly. I don’t have any other options. I grab Ana’s hand and allow her to pull me up. Liam nods, and tension I didn’t realize was there slips off Daniel’s face.
“I’ll see you at lunch.” He drops a brief kiss on my cheek then pushes out into the bright sunlight.
“Let’s walk.” Ana tucks my arm into hers and the three of us walk outside.
The main street is still bustling with activity as the village launches into another day. To our left, Frank has already found Daniel and the two of them amble down the street, engaged in an animated conversation. Ana tugs my arm to the right and we head in the opposite direction.
“Do you know what I admire about you, Rebecca? It’s your passion.” Ana pats my arm. “And not just your passion, but the way you express it. You’ve got a way with words, which incidentally, I suspect had a role in your Rejection. But that’s also why I think I have the perfect job for you.”
Liam holds open a door, and Ana bounces in, tugging me along with her. Inside, the intoxicating aroma of baking bread soaks into my pores. Ana pulls me deeper into the bakery, but Liam hangs back at the door. Everything inside is coated in a thin dusting of flour, including a full wall of shelves holding bread pans filled with rising balls of dough. All the yeast, sugar, and flour mix together to make my mouth water despite the fact that I just finished breakfast.
“Morning Carol, do I smell raisins?” Ana coughs a bit and waves her hand in front of her face to shoo away the flour that seems to float in the air.
“Keep it a secret, dear. We got a nice supply in the last load so I thought I’d whip up some bread pudding as a special treat in honor of our new arrivals.” Carol nods her head of curly gray hair in my direction, and my chest fills with warmth. This place really is a little slice of perfection.
“My lips are sealed.” Ana turns to me and pulls me over to the table where Carol is kneading another roll of dough. “Carol, Rebecca. Rebecca, Carol. This is the lady responsible for all the puddles of drool on my desk. Speaking of, time to get to work.”
Carol is easily the oldest person I’ve seen so far. In addition to her gray hair, wrinkles branch out from her smiling eyes and crease her forehead. My fingers worry at my necklace, and I smile at the memory of my own grandmother baking sweet treats.
Ana walks back toward the door where Liam is leaning against the wall watching our interactions with his arms crossed and a little smile on his face. “You can head off and do all your important leader duties.” She lifts up onto her toes and plants a kiss on his cheek. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Alright, try not to scare her off on her first day.”
Ana pushes him gently out the door and adds a quick tickle to his ribs. “You do your job and let me do mine.” She closes the door behind him, but immediately opens it back up, leaning her head out. “See you at lunch.” She closes the door and turns back to me. “Now, time to get to work.”
“Listen, this might not be the right place for me. I don’t know anything about baking bread.”
Ana laughs like a small child full of giddy delight. Carol booms with a deep belly laugh from behind me. “As if Carol would ever let anyone else even come close to her bread. No, I’m hoping you’ll be much more interested in what I have in my office. Come on.”
She gives Carol a wave and heads upstairs, pulling me behind her. The space is open just like the room above Doc’s office. But where we have bare walls and sparse beds, Ana has one huge open room without an inch of free space anywhere. Everywhere I look are maps, lists of all kinds, sheets with strings of numbers, and so many items I can’t identify.
Ana bounces over to an over-sized table and pulls out two chairs. “Come. Sit. Learn.”
I pull my eyes away from the walls and wander over to the table where she’s moving stacks of paper and folders from one place to another. I’ve never seen so much paper in my life. Back in the Territories, everything was on our Noteboards and paper was scarce, only used for the most important documents or special items, like our dance cards.
“Don’t you have a Noteboard?”
“Yeah, there’s one over there.” She flicks her wrist at the corner where a Noteboard in pristine condition rests precariously on a table overflowing with paper. “I tried it, but I like my system better.” She lifts away a completely scrawled over calendar to reveal a huge map that covers the entire table.
“Your system? What is this place?”
“Neat, huh?” Anna grins at me like a kid on her birthday. Her excitement is infectious and spurs a bubbly feeling in my stomach. “I like to call it my command center.”
“What do you command?”
Anna rubs her hands together with unrestrained glee. “Everything.”
“You lost me. Can we start over?”
“Okay, you sit, I’ll talk?”
I move a thick folder to the floor and sit in one of the chairs, my eyes floating from one end of the room to the other.
Ana spreads her hands across the map in a presentation style. “Now, tell me if this looks familiar to you.”
I lean over the table and try to make sense of the different colors, lines, and symbols. “It kinda looks like a map of the United Territories. Except it’s bigger and the labels are all wrong.”
“Good, good.” She grabs a purple marker and marks off an area inside the map. “So this part inside is what we know as the United Territories. And before we were the Territories, we were the states. That’s what you see in this map, along with Canada and Mexico. You with me?”
I nod. “We learned in school that the Territories used to be the states, but the name was changed after the government dissolved and the original Cardinal took over.”
“Yeah, well, like most things they teach in the Territories, that’s mor
e of a half-truth.”
I trace my finger around the purple lines she just added. “So what’s the whole truth?”
“The history books start out right. The states were completely out of control. Violence was so commonplace that infrastructure shut down. Farmers let their fields go empty, and factories shut down. The combination of violence and lack of resources created a drastic drop in population.”
“Right, that’s when people abandoned the small towns and moved to the few cities that still had food and power.”
Ana taps the map with a little more force than needed. “Except we were taught that everyone moved. The rest of the country was left empty as the citizens flocked to the safety that the Cardinal promised everyone.”
I shrug my shoulders. “He did make them safer. Then the Machine was invented and the current Cardinal pretty much eliminated violence.”
“Along with personal freedom and the ability to be anything other than exactly what the Cardinal ordered. But not everyone bought into all the promises he was selling.”
I nod. “The Freemen.”
Ana nods back. “The Cardinal set up the Territories around the country’s most essential natural resources and then abandoned everything in-between. That left the Freemen alone to create their own society. With the old money system worthless, they reverted to a trade system and that’s what I do here.”
“Trade? You mean with Arbor Glen.”
“No, not with them.” She holds her hands up to stave off my questions. “That’s Liam’s story to tell. This,” she taps a little flag on the map, “is where we are, in what used to be Virginia.”
“What are all the rest of the flags?”
“Those are known Freemen villages.”
“What? All of them?” My eyes fly over the map. “There must be dozens.”
“One hundred forty-two known villages, to be exact, spread out throughout all of what used to be the United States. And that’s where this office comes in.”
She bounces over to one of the walls and gestures to several of the lists pinned to the wall. “Right here I have the latitude and longitude coordinates for each village we know about. The ones marked in green are active traders and the ones in orange like to keep to themselves.” She moves over to another section. “Here is a list of village-specific specialties. These are the items that are only available through one or two villages and might require an extra-long trip or coordination with another village to collect similar supplies.”
Rite of Revelation (Acceptance Book 2) Page 10